quinta-feira, 26 de novembro de 2009

Toddlers have amazing philosophical minds that work like computers and can teach us a world about ourselves

I confess the idea of babies carrying on philosophical investigations never crossed my mind until I met Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Gopnik, a cognitive scientist with cross-training in philosophy and common sense, has spent her career carefully and cleverly teasing out the previously unsuspected complexity of a baby's thoughts. In her new book, "The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life," Gopnik incisively and compassionately highlights the extraordinary range of mental capabilities of even the youngest child.

What makes Gopnik's book stand out from the myriad recent books on consciousness is her overarching insight into the sophisticated ways that even infants think and scheme. Citing her work and that of colleagues, Gopnik makes a convincing case that, from a very early age, even before the acquisition of language, we are actively engaged in assessing everything from statistics (probabilities) to right vs. wrong in a moral sphere. Recently I sat down with Gopnick for a conversation about how each of us began our thinking, and how kids might presently be looking at the world.

What inspired you to study the "philosophical baby"?

I've know since the first time I read Plato, when I was 11, that I wanted to try to think about some of the great philosophical questions. How do we know about the world? How do we understand other people? What is consciousness? Where does morality come from? But by the time I was 11, I was also the oldest child of six siblings and I had the first of my own three babies when I was 23. So I've also always wanted to try to answer some equally deep questions about children themselves. How can they learn so much so quickly? What is it like to be a baby? Why do we love them so much?

Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements. Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical. They seem so unlike us, yet they actually are us. Sometimes they seem so brilliant, and then the next minute they do something that seems so dumb.

When you read about children, either in ubiquitous parenting books or in memoirs and autobiographies, all you get is the personal. What should I do to make my baby smarter? What did my parents do to make me who I am? The idea of the book was to take a step back from the personal and immediate and think about babies and young children from this wider scientific and philosophical perspective. Thinking about babies could help us understand philosophy and thinking philosophically could help us understand babies.

Why do you think so little has been written about the philosophy of children -- that philosophy, for 2,500 years, has essentially excluded thinking about kids?

There are two reasons. Philosophers used to rely on their armchair intuitions about how minds work. If you look at babies casually, your intuition is likely to be that not much is going on. In the '70s, new video technologies allowed us to develop experimental techniques for investigating babies' minds. Since then, philosophers are increasingly paying attention to these scientific results, rather than simply relying upon untested intuitions.

The other reason was that for those 2,500 years, there were people who had a great deal of deep experience of babies and who knew all along how important and interesting babies were. But those people were women and the philosophers were men. An Oxford philosopher once told me, "Well, one has seen children about, of course, but one would never actually talk to them." Now, partly because women like me have become scientists and philosophers, those two areas of human experience don't seem so separate.

One of the difficulties in knowing how babies think is that they can't describe their thought processes. Yet psychologists have devised some very ingenious experiments to show that by age 12 to 15 months, infants with very limited vocabulary are already developing a clear cause-and-effect sense of how the world is put together. Without the benefit of much language, how do you think the brain creates this knowledge?

Alan Turing had one of the greatest scientific insights of the 20th century, when he realized that a physical system that was organized in a particular way could do many of the things that a human mind can do. That idea allowed us to build computers, physical systems that can reason and calculate without language or consciousness. The great idea of cognitive science is that the human brain is a computer -- though one profoundly different and vastly more powerful than the ones we have now. Once this idea was out there, it made sense to think that babies' brains were just as capable of computation as adult brains, even though babies might not be able to report what their brains were doing in a self-conscious reflective way. And that’s just what we’ve discovered. In fact, studying babies can give us new ideas about how to design learning computers.

Presumably, if present in very young infants, this ability must be innate, as if our brains are hard-wired to sort out cause-and-effect even before we acquire language.

Well, developmental psychologists won't say something is innate unless we've found it in newborn babies -- which is tough, but remarkably, not at all impossible! So babies might actually somehow develop these causal learning methods in the first few months of life. But they certainly are there very early.

How is this different from the ways in which other animals learn about the world?

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways. Crows are amazingly sophisticated at understanding how physical objects like wires and twigs work. Living with us seems to have led dogs to evolve to be enormously clever at making people think they are loved. You could think of them as Stepford Wolves. But in a way that's just the point. Animals seem to home in on very particular kinds of causal relationships that are important to their survival. They also rely heavily on trial and error to learn which actions are effective on the world. But human children learn abstract cause-and-effect relationships just for the fun of it, even when they're not particularly relevant to survival.

Old-line psychologists such as Piaget thought that children didn't understand cause-and-effect until they were well into their school years. Why didn't earlier psychologists notice that young children could easily construct complex theories of causation?

Piaget observed babies tremendously closely and he realized just how philosophically important and interesting they were -- though much of the observation was actually done by his wife, Valentine. But even closely observing young children doesn't really tell you what they can do. For example, we've discovered that young children have much better cued memory than spontaneous recall. If you ask a 3-year-old an apparently straightforward question like "How does this machine work?" you're likely to get a sweet look and either silence or stream of consciousness poetry. But if you ask them, "Does the blue block make it go or does the yellow block make it go?" they will give you the right answer. You have to ask babies and children questions in their language, not ours. It's taken us 30 years to figure out how to do that, and we're still learning.

Very young children readily imagine a variety of outcomes to any given situation. For example, 2-year-olds can tell you that if their imaginary teddy bear is drinking imaginary tea and spills it, the imaginary tea will have to be mopped up. Is this ability to imagine the what-ifs of life what most separates human from non-human thought?

I think so, though again animals are smarter than we thought. Still, humans have a special ability to think "counterfactually," to imagine what might have happened rather than remember what did happen, and animals certainly don't do that as much as we do. For better or worse, we live in possible worlds as much as actual ones. We are cursed by that characteristically human guilt and regret about what might have been in the past. But that may be the cost for our ability to hope and plan for what might be in the future.

If the ability to imagine cause-and-effect begins before children have well-developed language and reasoning skills, does this tell us that the origins of the kinds of questions we ask are also deeply rooted in our biology?

Well, of course, everything about us is rooted in our brains. But brains aren't fixed by our genes. Instead they are dramatically plastic, capable of changing to fit all those new environments we encountered when we started our Pleistocene wanderings, and the even more remarkable new environments we create for ourselves. Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water. What we do as scientists and philosophers is an extension of that childhood drive -- the questions keep changing but the drive to ask them is what makes us human.

I remember my mother quoting Dr. Spock as "the authority" on child rearing. Now there are theories to satisfy any parenting position. Some psychologists such as Judith Harris have gone so far as to suggest that parenting has little long-term effect on how children think. Where do you weigh in?

This is an interesting case of the way that scientific importance and everyday interests are at odds. Parents tend to focus on very small differences -- like whether my kid will be more likely to get into Harvard than yours -- among children who are otherwise living in very similar environments. But, scientifically, we wouldn't expect to be able to say much about differences at that scale. We can't predict very much about how my parenting, as opposed to that of my friends, will influence my child as opposed to theirs, which is what all those parents want to know.

What do you think makes one a better parent?

Well, I can tell you what won't make you a better parent or your child any smarter. The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there -- not to mention the Baby Einstein DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys -- won't do a thing to make your baby smarter. That's largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways. In the relationship between early experience and later life, there is not a shred of scientific evidence that any of that makes a difference.

That doesn't mean, as people like Judith Harris say, that parenting itself doesn't make a difference. It makes an enormous difference. Even the most self-consciously "bad" parent is already putting a lifetime's worth of effort and energy and care and devotion into the life of their child, effort and care and love that would be saintly if you devoted it to anyone else. It also isn't that there's some innate program that requires just a minimal amount of nurturing to unfold. Specific changes and differences in caregiving make a vast difference. Reading and schooling have made an enormous difference to children. Poverty has an enormous impact on children. Children learn all the contours of daily life from their parents. To conclude that parenting has no effect is like saying that because I can't tell you specifically whether carbon emissions will cause a hurricane in New Orleans this year, global warming has no effect on the weather.

There's a more profound philosophical, and even moral point, here. We can't predict much about how our parenting will influence our children in the long term. Many people may achieve great things as adults, in spite of or even just because of, the fact they were miserable as kids. But we have enormous power over our child's lives when they are children. We can determine whether our children thrive as children, and whether they remember that thriving childhood as adults. Isn't that actually more important? Instead of anxiously asking will my caregiving make my son go to Harvard 20 years from now, why not proudly think my caregiving will make my son have just the life that I shape for him, right now, with my particular jokes and quirks and devotion?

Do you think your work has made you a better parent?

Being a developmental psychologist didn't make me any better at dealing with my own children, no. I muddled through, and, believe me, fretted and worried with the best of them. But I think it did make me even more appreciative of the richness and complexity of children's minds, and watching them certainly made me a better scientist.

In the '80s, as I began to wonder how we come to understand others people's minds, my 2-year-old, Andres, had to cope one night with pineapple with kirsch as dessert. For months afterward, he would thoughtfully remark, apropos of nothing, "Mommy, you know, pineapples -- they're yummy for you but yucky for me." And that became the germ for a whole line of studies that showed that toddlers are far from being the egocentric solipsists we once thought, and how they, and therefore we, start to understand that other people can want something different than we do.

Children, by being less focused, have a greater general awareness and ability to imagine than us older fossils. Is there a take-away message for how to maximize a child's free spirit and imagination while, at the same time, forcing her to spend the hours necessary to learn algebra, geometry and the capital of Peru?

The message is that there is a necessary trade-off between two different kinds of intelligence -- a trade-off built right into our evolutionary nature. On the one hand, there is our childhood ability to imagine and explore a very wide range of possibilities and to learn new causal maps without caring about their immediate usefulness. On the other, there is our adult ability to put that learning to work to plan and act effectively, swiftly and automatically. Babies and young children are useless on purpose. They are unable to focus, plan and act, so they can wander and dream and play. We grown-up caregivers do the planning and acting for them.

For most of history, education, in the form of apprenticeship, was about turning the discoveries of early childhood into the narrow, focused, automatic competencies of adulthood. But sometime in the 17th century, we discovered that we could reproduce this evolutionary division of labor among adults. We could have professional scientists, for example, who just got to explore and learn about the world without exploiting it for any useful purpose. And we could have institutions like universities, where adults got to do the same thing. Or at least were supposed to; the real function of universities is mostly assortative mating. So we began to try to develop both types of intelligence at once, to have a school system that rewards flexibility and imagination and competence at the same time.

I think we should encourage a kind of cognitive bilingualism in both adults and children. We should have times in our lives or institutions when we can learn and explore and play, and other times in which we can plan and execute and work. An unsung joy of caregiving and child rearing is that it gives you a wonderful opportunity to recapture the imagination and play of childhood at the same time that you're doing the most important kind of adult work there is.

"The Philosophical Baby" is not exactly a how-to book for parents. But if it were, what can reading it do for parents?

It will do the same thing that reading about the stars does. You gaze up at the stars and they're awesome. And then you read about astronomy and the next time you gaze at the stars you realize, "My God, they really are awesome." Parents gaze at their children, when they're not driving themselves crazy with parenting books, and think, "They're amazing!" And what I can tell them is, "You don't know the half of it, they're even more amazing than you think!"

What are you doing when you aren't doing anything at all? If you said "nothing," then you have just passed a test in logic and flunked a test in neuroscience. When people perform mental tasks--adding numbers, comparing shapes, identifying faces--different areas of their brains become active, and brain scans show these active areas as brightly colored squares on an otherwise dull gray background. But researchers have recently discovered that when these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark.

This dark network (which comprises regions in the frontal, parietal and medial temporal lobes) is off when we seem to be on, and on when we seem to be off. If you climbed into an MRI machine and lay there quietly, waiting for instructions from a technician, the dark network would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your instructions arrived and your task began, the bees would freeze and the network would fall silent. When we appear to be doing nothing, we are clearly doing something. But what?

quinta-feira, 19 de novembro de 2009

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine set out to address a question that has been challenging scientists for years: How do dietary restriction—and the reverse, overconsumption—produce protective effects against aging and disease?

An answer lies in a two-part study led by Charles Mobbs, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience and of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, published in the November 17 edition of the journal Public Library of Science Biology. The study, titled "Role of CBP and SATB-1 in Aging, Dietary Restriction, and Insulin-Like Signaling," examines how dietary restriction and a high-caloric diet influence biochemical responses.

Dr. Mobbs and his colleagues unraveled a molecular puzzle to determine that within certain parameters, a lower-calorie diet slows the development of some age-related conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, as well as the aging process. How the diet is restricted—whether fats, proteins or carbohydrates are cut—does not appear to matter. "It may not be about counting calories or cutting out specific nutrients," said Dr. Mobbs, "but how a reduction in dietary intake impacts the glucose metabolism, which contributes to oxidative stress." Meanwhile, a high calorie diet may accelerate age-related disease by promoting oxidative stress.

Dietary restriction induces a transcription factor called CREB-binding protein (CBP), which controls the activity of genes that regulate cellular function. By developing drugs that mimic the protective effects of CBP – those usually caused by dietary restriction – scientists may be able to extend lifespan and reduce vulnerability to age-related illnesses.

"We discovered that CBP predicts lifespan and accounts for 80 percent of lifespan variation in mammals," said Dr. Mobbs. "Finding the right balance is key; only a 10 percent restriction will produce a small increase in lifespan, whereas an 80 percent restriction will lead to a shorter life due to starvation."

The team found an optimal dietary restriction, estimated to be equivalent to a 30 percent caloric reduction in mammals, increased lifespan over 50 percent while slowing the development of an age-related pathology similar to Alzheimer's disease.

The first part of the study looked at C. elegans, a species of roundworm, that were genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's disease-like symptoms. Dr. Mobbs and his team reduced the roundworms' dietary intake by diluting the bacteria the worms consume. In these types of roundworms, human beta amyloid peptide, which contributes to plaque buildup in Alzheimer's disease, is expressed in muscle, which becomes paralyzed as age progresses. This model allowed researchers to readily measure how lifespan and disease burden were simultaneously improved through dietary restriction.

The researchers found that when dietary restriction was maintained throughout the worms' adulthood, lifespan increased by 65 percent and the Alzheimer's disease-related paralysis decreased by about 50 percent.

"We showed that dietary restriction activates CBP in a roundworm model, and when we blocked this activation, we blocked all the protective effects of dietary restriction," said Dr. Mobbs. "It was the result of blocking CBP activation, which inhibited all the protective effects of dietary restriction, that confirmed to us that CBP plays a key role in mediating the protective effects of dietary restriction on lifespan and age-related disease. "

In the second part of study, Dr. Mobbs and his team looked at the other end of this process: What happens to CBP in a high-calorie diet that has led to diabetes, a disease in which glucose metabolism is impaired? Researchers examined mice and found that diabetes reduces activation of CBP, leading Dr. Mobbs to conclude that a high-calorie diet that leads to diabetes would have the opposite effect of dietary restriction and would accelerate aging.

Dr. Mobbs hypothesizes that dietary restriction induces CBP by blocking glucose metabolism, which produces oxidative stress, a cellular process that leads to tissue damage and also promotes cancer cell growth. Interestingly, dietary restriction triggers CBP for as long as the restriction is maintained, suggesting that the protective effects may wear off if higher dietary intake resumes. CBP responds to changes in glucose within hours, indicating genetic communications respond quickly to fluctuations in dietary intake.

"Our next step is to understand the exact interactions of CBP with other transcription factors that mediate its protective effects with age," said Dr. Mobbs. "If we can map out these interactions, we could then begin to produce more targeted drugs that mimic the protective effects of CBP."

About The Mount Sinai Medical Center

The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The Mount Sinai Hospital is one of the nation's oldest, largest and most-respected voluntary hospitals. Founded in 1852, Mount Sinai today is a 1,171-bed tertiary-care teaching facility that is internationally acclaimed for excellence in clinical care. Last year, nearly 50,000 people were treated at Mount Sinai as inpatients, and there were nearly 450,000 outpatient visits to the Medical Center.

Mount Sinai School of Medicine is internationally recognized as a leader in groundbreaking clinical and basic science research, as well as having an innovative approach to medical education. With a faculty of more than 3,400 in 38 clinical and basic science departments and centers, Mount Sinai ranks among the top 20 medical schools in receipt of National Institute of Health (NIH) grants. For more information, please visit www.mountsinai.org.

The largest national stem cell study for heart disease showed the first evidence that transplanting a potent form of adult stem cells into the heart muscle of subjects with severe angina results in less pain and an improved ability to walk. The transplant subjects also experienced fewer deaths than those who didn't receive stem cells.

In the 12-month Phase II, double-blind trial, subjects' own purified stem cells, called CD34+ cells, were injected into their hearts in an effort to spur the growth of small blood vessels that make up the microcirculation of the heart muscle. Researchers believe the loss of these blood vessels contributes to the pain of chronic, severe angina.

"This is the first study to show significant benefit in pain reduction and improved exercise capacity in this population with very advanced heart disease," said principal investigator Douglas Losordo, M.D., the Eileen M. Foell Professor of Heart Research at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a cardiologist and director of the program in cardiovascular regenerative medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the lead site of the study.

Losordo, also director of the Feinberg Cardiovascular Research Institute, said this study provides the first evidence that a person's own stem cells can be used as a treatment for their heart disease. He cautioned, however, that the findings of the 25-site trial with 167 subjects, require verification in a larger, Phase III study.

He presented his findings Nov. 17 at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2009.

Out of the estimated 1 million people in the U.S. who suffer from chronic, severe angina -- chest pain due to blocked arteries -- about 300,000 cannot be helped by any traditional medical treatment such as angioplasty, bypass surgery or stents. This is called intractable or severe angina, the severity of which is designated by classes. The subjects in Losordo's study were class 3 or 4, meaning they had chest pain from normal to minimal activities, such as from brushing their teeth or even resting.

The stem cell transplant is the first therapy to produce an improvement in severe angina subjects' ability to walk on a treadmill. Twelve months after the procedure, the transplant subjects were able to double their improvement on a treadmill compared to the placebo group. It also took twice as long until they experienced angina pain on a treadmill compared to the placebo group, and, when they felt pain, it went away faster with rest. In addition, they had fewer overall episodes of chest pain in their daily lives.

In the trial, the CD34+ cells were injected into 10 locations in the heart muscle. A sophisticated electromechanical mapping technology identifies where the heart muscle is alive but not functioning, because it is not receiving enough blood supply.

The study was supported by Baxter Healthcare Corporation. Losordo formerly was a paid consultant to Baxter.

Marla Paul is the health sciences editor. Contact her at marla-paul@northwestern.edu

Despite the global economic-financial crisis and the cruel and unjust blockade imposed for more than 50 years by successive U.S. administrations, Cuba is continuing to develop innovative biotechnology products to improve the quality of life of its population and other nations.

Dr. Gerardo Guillén Nieto, director of biomedical research at Havana’s Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center (CIGB) in Havana, told Granma International that the center currently has around 70 research-development projects centering on important medical issues such as infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

Reports from the World Health Organization indicate that 45% of deaths in poor countries are due to infectious diseases.

The situation in Cuba changed after 1959 and these diseases ceased to be a health problem thanks to the epidemiological vigilance directed by the prestigious Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK), which has four centers of cooperation with global and Pan-American health organizations, including one dedicated to dengue and its vector.

The most predominant health problems for Cubans are now chronic non-transferable diseases, with an increase in the number of cases of cancer and cardiovascular disease, among the most common causes of death in First World countries.

CIGB’s portfolio of projects is very impressive, Dr. Guillén stated, explaining that it contains innovative products, some which have been recently developed and others which are still in the development process.

Among those recently registered, he mentioned the combined Heberpenta vaccine and Heberprot-P, an injectable solution of epidermal growth factor.

CIGB, the Finlay Institute, and the Reactive Chemical Laboratory at the University of Havana contributed to its invention.

Second of its type in the world, this liquid vaccine has achieved the same level of effectiveness as the one produced by the transnational GlaxoSmithKline.

The Cuban pentavalent vaccine is part of the massive and free National Vaccine Program that protects the infant population against 13 preventable diseases and has allowed the country to prevent the resurgence of diseases that have been eliminated, including polio (eradicated in 1962 – Cuba was the first country on the continent to eradicate this disease), Neonatal tetanus (since 1972), diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, rubella, and tubercular meningitis in children of under 12 months.

Heberprot-P is the only product in the world that helps heal complicated ulcers, like diabetic foot ulcers (UPD), and reduces the risk of amputation of the inferior members of these patients, thereby increasing their quality of life.

There are 285 million diabetics in the world today, a figure that is predicted to rise to 438 million in 2030, according to estimates by international agencies.

In Cuba, the number of diabetics could reach 624,000 by 2010, according to Dr. Oscar Díaz Díaz, director of the National Institute of Endocrinology, on a 2007 Cuban Television "Roundtable" program on this disease and its treatment.

However, the island has the lowest mortality rate for diabetes (12.3 per 1,000 inhabitants) of the entire American continent, as noted in a report from the Pan-American Health Organization.

Developed by CIGB in conjunction with the National Institute of Angiology and Vascular Surgery, Heberprot-P was registered in Cuba in June 2006 and, in April 2007, was included within the basic spectrum of 866 medications, 537 of which are produced nationally.

Available in angiology services Cuban hospitals, work is ongoing to extend its use to the primary healthcare sector since last year," Ernesto López Mola, CIGB head of business development, informed Granma International in an interview in 2008.

The medication is patented in the United States, European Union, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, South Africa, the Russian Federation, China, India, and Ukraine. Its use has been authorized in Venezuela and Algeria.

However, American citizens cannot benefit from this medicine due to the U.S. blockade of Cuba.

In the United States, there are almost 20 million diabetics. More than 70,000 amputations related to UPD and diabetic wounds are reported each year and cost the health care system around $11.3 billion per annum.

Heberpenta and Heberprot-P are the most recent acquisitions of Heber Biotec S., an agency that exclusively markets biotechnology and pharmaceutical products, technological services, and research-development products from CIGB and other important Cuban laboratories and institutions to 45-plus countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe.

Heber Biotec S.A. has more than 200 approved health registries in 52 countries and signed distribution agreements with companies all over the world.

Madaisy Cueto Sánchez, the organization’s promotion and publicity manager, explained to GI that both products are marketed under the Heberfarma product line, the pentavalent in the vaccine sector and Heberprot-P in the biological pharmaceutical sector.

According to data provided to GI, more than 335 million people in the world have benefited from the vaccines that Heber Biotec S.A. exports.

In addition to the pentavalent vaccine, the company markets Trivac HB (against dipheria, whooping cough, tetanus, and Hepatitis B), the Heberbiovac HB recombinant (against Hepatitis B) and the combined

Quimi-Hib (against the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae type b).

Heber Biotec S.A. and CIGB together form a complex of research-development, production, and marketing.

Inaugurated on July 1, 1986, CIGB is a vanguard institution in Cuban Biosciences. The institution’s principal value is in its personnel, who are highly qualified and committed to the development of new products to improve the quality of life of millions of people around the world, as well as other applications for agriculture and livestock.

It has laboratories endowed with the state-of-the-art equipment needed for high level modern biotechnology research and has production facilities that meet the highest international standards.

CIGB is part of the Scientific Complex to the west of Havana established in 1991 in order to accelerate the development of biotechnology and medical-pharmaceutical products via the systematic coordination of research, teaching, and specialized production among different institutions. The original idea came from a speech given by Fidel Castro in the 1980s.

At the recently concluded 2009 Havana Biotechnology Conference, Dr. Luis Herrera, director of CIGB, acknowledged the role played by the leader of the Cuban Revolution as the precursor to the country’s biotechnological development. In the 1980s, this sector received an initial government investment of more than $1.5 billion, which allowed the undeveloped and blockaded nation to place itself alongside the most developed countries in this field in the world.

Of the products being developed by CIGB, Dr. Guillén emphasized Proctokinasa, which is nothing more than the application of the Estreptoquinasa recombinant via the rectum in the form of a suppository, which helps break up clots. This product is the next to be registered.

He stated that an Alpha Interferon 2b Human Recombinant gel (Hebergel), indicated for low-grade cervical lesions, is currently in phase three of clinical trials. In addition, HeberPAG, a combination of Gamma Interferon human recombinant and Alpha 2b Human Recombinant, indicated for brain cancer, is currently in the advanced stages of development.

He noted that the therapeutic vaccine against Hepatitis C (Heberterap C) is currently in phase 2 of clinical trials in chronic patients and added that studies are underway for its prophylactic application.

In relation to the therapeutic vaccine against prostate cancer (Heberprovac) he stated that phase one of clinical trials has now concluded. Projects currently in the preclinical research stage include a prophylactic vaccine against the four strains of the dengue virus (Cuba is one of three countries in the Americas where this disease is not endemic), and drugs against diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.

Some of these projects were presented by Cuba at the 2009 Havana Biotechnology Conference, dedicated this year to medical applications in that branch of knowledge. Prominent researchers, including the 2008 Nobel Prize Winner in Physiology and Medicine Harald zur Hausen, and 1988 Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry Robert Huber, attended the event.

During the conference, close to 500 specialists from more than 30 countries were informed about Cuban biotechnology products, which contribute to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of 26 diseases.

In 2007, Cuban pharmaceutical and biotechnology products were the country’s second highest export item, only exceeded by nickel. The income generated from the sale of pharmaceuticals was valued at $350 million.

The prestigious British scientific magazine Nature described the Cuban biotechnology industry as the best established in the Third World. This is not by chance.